'They still talk years, we talk today!'

That's Peter Coffee, director, Platform Research, Salesforce.com. He was at NILF 2009 and Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News had an exclusive tete-a-tete where we discussed issues like scalability, proprietary comeback, commoditization, legacy issues and customization as the many beans surrounding the cloud. Read on.

It's quite interesting today. You have been almost the pioneers of SaaS and now we see every player from big to small start-ups jumping on the bandwagon. Does commoditization concern you?

For one, it makes the technology more visible. But we are not here to compete for free. We have been and would always be a customer-grade product. No free lunches for sure. We give a business tool and that for excellent value. It's only cheaper.

There's an argument in general against off-the-shelf ERPs that talks about the conspicuous lack of customization. Your view?

We architect our applications at a meta-data level and offer customized work flows, automatic tracking and UI (User Interface) environments. All this customization is not just at the organization or industry level but also at different rungs within the company, be it flexibility for a sales representative or the unique needs of his sales manager. One can define and control in a specific way. The hosting is standard but every customer is given a unique window and a different experience as required.

How do you view the growing attempts of traditional proprietary software and ERP players to make themselves relevant in the SaaS market with cloud offerings?

Well, all of them claim to be enhancing their portfolio with service-based offerings. But look at the time line they promise. I just heard Microsoft head honcho's vision of making strides in this market. The problem is a time-horizon like three years is too long. It astounds me to think that other players can think of affording a timeline like that. That's eccentric.

At Salesforce, we have a 12 quarter year and we come with three substantial upgrades every year. Mind you, every upgrade is meaningful, and not just for the sake of it. We maintain almost 100 new features per upgrade and at the same time make sure it is non-disruptive. Also we never withdraw our support. We don't make money by upgrades unlike others. We make money by service.

Is CIO adoption going in the right direction? How big is a challenge of legacy infrastructures?

Legacy challenge is mainly about awareness. We have to make CIOs understand that they don't have to replace a legacy. The black box can stay there like earlier. It's about adding standard web-based services and capabilities around it and explore that functionality to our cloud. It builds much more capability and value to their original asset. We are hearing figures like 37 per cent of firms ripping off old systems with SaaS.

In general terms, the vast majority of the world is still far from understanding SaaS. Vast majority of customers are still stuck with packaged applications and have not begun to explore its power.

Are arguments around security and scalability being addressed?

Our security is world-class with ongoing certifications, audits and reviews. In terms of scale, that is not really a problem because of our follow-the-sun model. Today, we can claim user-base as big as 1.1. million users. Our single largest customer of the 65,00 customers can scale up without any issues.

How significant is the Green IT proposition to SaaS?

Of course, SaaS is more environmentally relevant. There's not much pumping of heat for sure. But apart from the obvious benefits like server reduction, look at the advantages like tele-commuting that heralds technology's role in green cause. It just takes off servers but also takes off cars from the road!

How exciting is India?

We are very eager to speak to the customers here specially the small and mid-sized firms. We are strongly interested in small enterprises and ready to make it grow. And I mean not someday like others, but today.